Netflix now has three true-crime documentaries about romance fraud in the mix: The Tinder Swindler, The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, and Bad Vegan.
If you’re on dating apps, watch them. Americans lost $1.16 billion to romance scams in the first nine months of 2025, with a median loss of $2,218. In 2024, the FBI logged $1.3 billion in romance and confidence-fraud losses. That’s probably still low, because plenty of cases never get reported.
Each documentary shows a different flavor of the same scam. In The Tinder Swindler, Simon Leviev, born Shimon Hayut, used Tinder and a carefully staged luxury persona in a case tied to about $10 million. In The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, Robert Hendy-Freegard posed as MI5 and manipulated seven women and one man out of nearly £1 million. In Bad Vegan, Anthony Strangis met Sarma Melngailis online and persuaded her to divert nearly $2 million with increasingly bizarre promises, including that he could make her dog immortal.
And the warning signs are the same ones experts keep naming, the ones people still miss: polished profiles, requests to move the chat to WhatsApp or Telegram, and stories about travel, security issues, bank problems, or emergencies that you can’t verify. The apps are trying to catch up. Tinder now requires Face Check for U.S. users. Bumble says its Deception Detector blocked 95% of scam or spam accounts in testing. Still, nearly 60% of 2025 losses started on social media, helped along by synthetic photos, cloned voices, and fake video calls. All three documentaries are streaming on Netflix now.
Author: Dave Warren Hans Co
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